Temporal attention refers to the ability to orient attention in time, which serves to enhance performance such as target detection and discrimination and is a fundamental component of cognitive function. Although some research indicates that temporal attention ability is affected by working memory updating, it is unclear whether temporal attention is also affected by the availability of working memory stores. To address this, participants were presented a dual-task paradigm requiring zero, three, or six digits to be held in working memory while engaged in a temporally cued visual discrimination task. Results show that working memory load did not differentially affect the ability to benefit from predictive temporal cues during the visual discrimination task. This indicates that temporal attention is not affected by available working memory stores. Interestingly, posterior beta band (12–30 Hz) activity was differentially modulated by temporal attention and working memory load, such that it decreased prior to expected targets and increased with load. Analysis across participants indicated that those individuals who exhibited greater temporal attention-based modulation of beta activity (i.e., predictive < neutrally cued) displayed improved discrimination performance, but also yielded lowered working memory accuracy. Thus, the ability to benefit from temporal attention processes while multitasking comes at the cost of lowered secondary task performance. Together, these results indicate that available working memory stores do not affect temporal attention ability. Rather, limitations in divided attention ability result in a performance cost that prioritizes one task over another, which may be indexed by beta band activity.

时间注意力是指将注意力及时定向的能力，用于提高目标检测和辨别等性能，是认知功能的基本组成部分。虽然一些研究表明时间注意力能力受工作记忆更新的影响，但尚不清楚时间注意力是否也受工作记忆库可用性的影响。为了解决这个问题，参与者被提出了一个双任务范式，要求在从事时间线索视觉辨别任务时将零、三或六位数字保存在工作记忆中。结果表明，工作记忆负荷对视觉辨别任务期间从预测性时间线索中受益的能力没有不同的影响。这表明时间注意力不受可用工作记忆库的影响。有趣的是，后β带（12-30 Hz）活动受到时间注意力和工作记忆负荷的不同调节，因此它在预期目标之前减少并随着负荷增加。对参与者的分析表明，那些表现出更大的基于时间注意力的 β 活动调制（即预测性 < 中性提示）的人表现出更好的辨别能力，但也降低了工作记忆的准确性。因此，在多任务处理时受益于时间注意力过程的能力是以降低次要任务性能为代价的。总之，这些结果表明可用的工作记忆存储不会影响时间注意能力。相反，分散注意力能力的限制导致性能成本使一项任务优先于另一项任务，